Managing bank transfer risk

If you’ve followed any of my work for the last few years it probably won’t come as a surprise to you that I believe real-time payments are going to be responsible for seismic risk reduction in the financial system.

Much to my own frustration real-time payments aren’t everywhere, yet.

So what do we do in the meantime? We take existing technology and use it to solve some problems for customers today.

Dwolla released a new endpoint today for developers which provides the ability to query bank account balances. It provides a solution to a number of the concerns we hear.

Some of them look like this:

I don’t want the actual money. I just want to know they actually have the money if we need it.

– or –

Our contract says that they won’t touch the account that holds customer funds but we can’t programmatically verify that customer funds are there.

– or –

If the account that’s meant to secure a customers position in the market can’t cover their position in the market anymore we need to close out their position. we need to Sell it or just contain it so we can control the risk. either way, we need to know.

– or –

They say they have X amount of dollars but I have no idea if that’s true. If they could give me access to their account it’d save a bunch of phone calls and fax hell.

In a digital era it seems insane that there isn’t already a solution to this problem that’s easy to access.